Chippewa County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Chippewa County

Eighty-five million tons of bulk commercial cargo per year — primarily Mesabi Range iron-ore taconite pellets bound from Lake Superior ports (Two Harbors, Duluth, Marquette) to the Lower Lakes steel mills in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio — transit the Soo Locks complex on the St. Marys River at Sault Ste. Marie, making it the busiest single-lock system in the Western Hemisphere per US Army Corps of Engineers Detroit District commerce statistics, and one of the chokepoints whose extended closure could disrupt American steel production within weeks. The four-lock complex (only one of which — the Poe Lock — is large enough to handle the modern 1,000-foot bulk freighters built since the 1970s) was authorized as a federal navigation project in 1881 and is administered by the Corps under permanent no-toll public-works status, with the Soo Locks Visitor Center on the US side offering free observation-deck access during the March-January shipping season. Sault Ste. Marie is the oldest city in Michigan and the third-oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States: French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette founded the original Sault Sainte Marie mission in 1668 to evangelize the Ojibwe of the St. Marys Rapids region, pre-dating Detroit by 33 years and Buffalo by 121 years.

Chippewa County's 1,561 sq mi wrap the eastern Upper Peninsula from the Mackinac Bridge approach south to the Canadian border at the International Bridge crossing, Tahquamenon Falls State Park (the Upper Falls drops 48 ft and 200 ft wide, the second-largest waterfall east of the Mississippi by mean annual flow volume after Niagara, with a distinctive amber tannin-stained color from upstream cedar swamp drainage that visitors initially mistake for industrial pollution), and the Lake Superior whitefish-fishery economy at Whitefish Bay (the canonical wreck site of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, lost November 10, 1975, with all 29 hands, memorialized in the Gordon Lightfoot song and at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point). Tahquamenon Falls SP campgrounds at Upper and Lower Falls each accept rigs to 50 ft with modern hookups across 320 combined sites — the largest single-park RV capacity in the eastern Upper Peninsula, with reservations opening 6 months out through Michigan DNR's reservation portal. Hiawatha National Forest's St. Ignace Ranger District permits 14-day dispersed camping at signed sites with rigs to 30 ft.